Audible Heat / World Service

_{_{Milo Thesiger-Meacham,

Casignano / Bed & Breakfast,

Via di Casignano, 1, 50012

Bagno A Ripoli

FIorence, Italy.}}

_{Audible Heat
Milo Thesiger-Meacham

World Service
Catalogue Number: WS003
79m16s

£10.00

PREORDERS FORTHCOMING

Releasing 12th March 2025

A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition

of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic

influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the

cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations

and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection

and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and

associative suite of fragments on the evocations of
background noise when brought to the fore.

Prior to its incarnation as a “Yellowjacket,”

Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat began as a work
for the radio—a commission for the 2023 Radophrenia

programme at Glasgow’s Centre for Conteporary Arts.

As a marker for the radiophonic history of this work, the

Tenement Press edition of Audible Heat publishes in

tandem with a CD release from WORLD SERVICE, a

Glasgow-based record label for direct-to-disc

avant-radio works.}
_{Audible Heat is read by

Milo Thesiger-Meacham,

& features original contributions

from Cristina Viti;

Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji;

Dr Gene Kritsky;

Dr Douglas Yanega;

& Matthias Loibner.

The work was recorded, produced

& scored by Milo Thesiger-Meacham,

2023 / 2024.

Audible Heat was first broadcast via

the temporary Radiophrenia channel

(radiophrenia.scot), September 2023;

& via Resonance Extra (resonance.extra),

November 2023.

Order a CD direct from

World Service here.

Order the publication direct from
Tenement Press here.

_{Sergio Leone on set in the Mirandilla Valley,

Badajoz Province, Extremadura, Spain (1966)}

Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat is an extended documentary, a fitful academic essay, a mass-media probe, an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing, a densely illustrated sound-art montage, and a deep dive into man’s complex relations with the seemingly eternal sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ in human consciousness.

Featuring original music and field recordings, and spoken contributions by writer and translator Cristina Viti and filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Audible Heat ranges across continents, embracing Greek tongue twisters, the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock, Plato’s Phaedrus, cicadas on the film sets of Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ the body language of Clint Eastwood, the apocalyptic premonitions of the Wampanoag, Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy, and botanist Donald C. Peattie’s terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality.}

^{A wonderful bringing together of natural and cultural histories.

Tom McCarthy

‘Each mortal thing,’ writes Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘does one thing and the same’ ...

       Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

   Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

     Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

But in Audible Heat, Milo Thesiger-Meacham elegantly and categorically refutes this idea and, in a text both singular and pluralistic, uncovers for us a creature which seems to speak of everything but itself. This mind-boggling encyclopaedic essay ranges across continents and cultural histories to offer us quietly radical termite art of a kind that Manny Farber would approve, nibbling omnidirectionally at the edges of philosophy, entomology, anthropology, poetry, music, film and diverse technologies.

In this synthesis of electric intellectual impulses and nimbly novel insights, sound looms large: like a latterday Langland the author “wente wide in this world wondres to here” only to find in a sound at once familiar and uncanny, eternal and pregnant with anticipation and dread, a hall of mirrors for the restless human soul. Like the sun, the cicada looms like likeness itself and we are led down garden paths that form a maze of amazing information, suggestion and nuance.

Armchair amateurs, we expect a traveller’s tales to feature monsters or larger than life extensions of their own id (giant sloths, Blemmyes, overwhelming flocks of wild geese) but this is a more modest affair, pitched at a scale where the human is not just always discernible but gently and incisively illuminated. It also speaks of the limits of species entrainment, of our faltering efforts at empathic behaviour, and tells us a lot about how we act in relation to other creatures, how culture sits with nature. Perhaps more important is how it subtly suggests how we should or might act.

Ed Baxter

A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.

Elizabeth Price

Almost Borgesian in the levity by which it seems effortlessly to embody encyclopaedic multitudes, Audible Heat deploys multiple perspectives to explore its themes. Of course it does: its agent provocateur—the cicada—not only has compound eyes, it also has five optical units. So, while scalar and focus shift are central to Thesiger-Meacham’s project, the author never loses sight of, nor respect for, his galvanising subject.

As the temperature rises on his investigation, moving from Sergio Leone’s Spanish Westerns to Socrates and beyond, we understand—and appreciate—the intricate assembly of fragments, quotations and images that factor in distance, as much as intimacy, as an engine to the work. Founded on an attentive silence, a patient accretion of time spent in both actual and meditative spaces (strategies we should surely also apply in our encounter here) Audible Heat balances both the warmth of genuine passion for its material with a controlled and “cool” gaze that makes for a singular outcome.

It's time to listen to the page; really listen.

Go closer. Closer, still.

Gareth Evans

Beautifully written.

Bhanu Kapil}

_{_{Top—M. T-M. / ‘Horse(s)’

Bottom—M. T-M. / ‘Dead Snake’}}

^{Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, composer, performer, broadcaster, and artistic director of the community arts radio stations Resonance FM and Resonance Extra. In 2022 he was commissioned by the European Capital of Culture to create ‘Body Edit Mind,’ a twenty-two-hour long audio work comprising six thousand discrete pieces of found material, and he has worked on solo and group projects for Tate Modern, The V&A Museum, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, London and Paris Fashion Weeks, Radiophrenia, Café OTO, Iklectik, Tenement Press, the European Poetry Festival, Waste Paper Opera, Lewisham Arthouse, Radio Revolten, IvyNODE & Tierra Vivente, Echoraeume amongst others.

See here for details on the 2024 edition of the Protoytpe Prize—judged by McCarthy, Price & Kapil—and co-run by Jess Chandler (Prototype) and Rory Cook (Monitor).}